[electroly]

"Short of..." indeed. You already know the answer, although it doesn't need to be general; it only needs to work on a single codebase.

A recent and highly relevant example is the migration of the TypeScript compiler to Go. They did not use an LLM to translate the code. Instead, they used LLM assistance to write a deterministic TypeScript-to-Go translator and then used that to translate the code. I have far more confidence in this approach than in letting the LLMs rip on the translation itself.

[mewpmewp2]

I think TypeScript to Go is far easier to translate than something to Rust though.

[ForHackernews]

Is it? I wouldn't assume that. Go is a smaller and less flexible language than Java/Typescript (I say that as a compliment) so it's not clear to me that all Typescript idioms have an obvious Go equivalent.

Leaving aside ownership, Rust is a big, complex, expressive language. I'm not that familiar with Zig, but I think it tries to be a "better, modern C" so it seems like it should be easily possible to mechanically translate Zig into direct Rust equivalences. You probably won't get "good" idiomatic Rust at the end, but you should get working code that does the same thing.